This week marks Fire & Tea’s 10th Birthday. You may not know, but Fire & Tea started out as a travel story blog so I could share the stories I wrote while out on the road or when I returned home. I was moved by the people I encountered, experiencing different cultures to mine, and tasting delicious foods. As a result, Fire & Teas wasn’t always written entirely from a vegan point of view.
So, what are the lessons after 10 years of blogging?
Things could’ve just stayed the same…
The first story I published was ‘A Day of Prayer in Damascus’. I wrote it a few months after I returned to Melbourne after travelling through Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Little did I know that I would be vegan two years later. I discovered so much joy in writing stories and my blog posts continued as I travelled through other parts of the world such as China, Vietnam, India and Nepal.
However, through my travels, I also started to understand the reality for animals overseas where animal rights aren’t a priority, and vegan was a far cry from what the majority ate. Sure, there were vegetarian options in many places I travelled. Though, vegan was another angle entirely; an angle I had yet to contemplate.
Change can be for the better but change can also be slow!
In mid-2012 I woke up one morning feeling a shift within myself. It was on my mind for about a week or so, but I decided that I had to make a change. I decided to go vegan. Going vegan wasn’t exactly an overnight process for me. My husband and I removed all animal products from our house but there were times I was still consuming dairy when we travelled, like during my time in Nepal and India. During my time in Nepal, I sampled a roadside masala tea and the experience led me to writing ‘A Roadside Masala Tea-stop’ the next year in 2013. But it’s in this experience that I realised being vegan doesn’t mean you need to follow everyone else in order to communicate a message and the joy of travel. You don’t have to travel the same path as everyone else. Being vegan can amplify your voice. Once I arrived home weeks later, I finally removed all dairy from my diet yet it took me over a year before I started writing about vegan food. Even then, I was still referring to myself as vegetarian because using the word vegan was still a big step. I took a vegetarian cooking class as a guest of RedBalloon (it was actually a vegan class because vegans were also taking the class) and I wrote about my experience in the blog post ‘Creative Cooking for Vegetarians’.
Travelling the vegan road opens your eyes to new opportunities…
Rejection is an inevitable part of the creative process and I’ve received a lot of that. But you just keep going. With every rejection, there was another publication waiting to publish my work. Those publications that were saying no were not ready to take a chance on a vegan piece. Culturally, it was too soon to be spruiking vegan experiences. Will they lose readers and advertisers? Too much was at stake for them, and I totally get it.
Dead-ends were aplenty, but so too were the opportunities to be published elsewhere. It’s a bit like applying for a visa. There’s a chance you may get rejected but, more often than not, the door will swing open for you. Being vegan means you get to try so many different dishes and experience an unlimited variety of flavour combinations. Furthermore, you can return home with stories of sampling veganised versions of national dishes. How cool is that!
Education is the key when you’re travelling the vegan road, and you can inspire others to try vegan when they travel, too.
But there are times when a proverbial spanner gets thrown into the works!
When you travel, it won’t always be smooth sailing. A spanner will get thrown into the works at some point. My spanner came in the form of an undiagnosed auto-immune condition called Coeliac Disease. I was diagnosed in late 2016 and I had to remove all gluten from my diet. At first, being coeliac was tiring and laborious. I was sick and tired of having to tell restaurants what my dietary requirements were and making sure they understood. Things are so much easier now, but it was tough at the beginning.
Still, the opportunities to get my work published didn’t diminish. I was invited along to a food famil at Shop 225. They were trying to get Coeliac Australia accreditation and they were keen to get the word out about their gluten-free options (not to mention a generous vegan menu alongside their non-vegan options). This proves that you can still continue to serve others even when your world gets turned upside down.
Despite all this, it’s the long game that counts…
Once you make the change, being vegan means being vegan for life and you won’t want to turn back. For me, I will never turn back and I will never make a U-turn. Being a gluten-free vegan means I can experience so much more that this world has to offer. It’s who I am now. I’m in it for the long game, a sustainable game that exemplifies my true passions in life – food, travel and writing.
To celebrate Fire & Tea’s 10th Birthday, you can download your free copy of my mini e-book Break Free for one week only! Your copy is available to download from now until 5.00pm Friday, January 22.
Update: My Breek Free offer has now closed. If you’d still like to secure a copy, then sign up to my monthly newsletter.
